There are no real surprise answers to that question, but many varying degrees of the latter, in “The Purge: Anarchy,” writer-director James DeMonaco’s sequel to his surprise B-movie hit from last year.

Despite its laughably implausible premise — in a near-future dystopia, all laws are suspended one night a year in a cathartic release of legalized violence — the original racked up nearly $90 million at the box office, making a follow-up inevitable.

Even without a slumming Ethan Hawke, who starred in a sci-fi thriller you might describe as “Panic Room” meets “The Hunger Games,” you’d expect the sequel to be an improvement based on production values alone, and you would be right, but not by much.

For “Anarchy,” DeMonaco drops the “Panic Room” but throws in some “Mad Max,” “V for Vendetta” and even a little “Malcolm X” for good measure with an ensemble cast that brings four mostly helpless bystanders (a mother and daughter and a squabbling couple) under the protection of a mysterious would-be Purger played by tall, dark and handsome Frank Grillo (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”). Together they fight through a phalanx of baddies in downtown LA that includes a menacingly masked motorcycle gang and a mysterious fleet of semi trucks seemingly packed with an entire private army.

Based on body count alone, you’d have to call it a topper. Meanwhile, Michael K. Williams — the talented actor who portrayed scar-faced Omar Little on HBO’s “The Wire” — turns up as a dissident leader railing against the neo-fascist regime known as the New Founding Fathers. He rouses a good rabble as part of a half-hearted attempt to turn “The Purge” into cultural commentary, but it’s not enough to make this grim vision of 2023 more convincing or compelling.

Even if it’s true that many of us harbor secret fantasies of going on a murderous rampage (which hardly seems likely), it’s not just fear of the law that prevents us from doing so. It’s self-preservation. “The Purge: Anarchy” never seems to run out of cannon fodder such as the flamethrower-wielding dune-buggy gangsters who make a brief, incendiary appearance in a subway tunnel, but one thing the movie makes gobsmackingly clear is that, when the only law is the law of the jungle, it doesn’t matter how big your gun is. There’s always going to be a guy with a bigger one.

Indeed, that may be the entire point, but if so, it only makes the premise all the more preposterous and the unimaginative gun porn all the more hypocritical.

It is, of course, possible to critique our culture’s obsession with violence while simultaneously indulging in it, but many a better director than this one has tried to walk that fine line and failed. DeMonaco’s name may end in a vowel, but that doesn’t make him a Coppola, Scorsese or Tarantino.